Steerage Living.
Every Atlantic liner consists of two worlds as far apart as heaven and hell.
One is the first-cabin passengers, the other is the steerage. One is clean, sunny, healthful; the other is filthy, dark, sickly. One is quiet and orderly; the other is a screaming, shouting, babbling pandemonium. One has a few beautiful and well-dressed children; the other swarms with children, dirty, crying, rolling over the floors, quarreling at the tops of their voices. One has the freedom of the wide horizons, the freshness of the sweet air, the spaces of broad decks for games and promenades and restful gazing and lounging; the other is cramped into packed tiers of humanity, where the air grows foul and deadly and the vision is smothered with misery. Nowhere on earth, I think, are the extremes of human fortune brought so closely together as on shipboard.
Yet let no one patronize the steerage from the promenade deck. Let it not be forgotten that Robert Louis Stevenson came over to America in that fashion. Not a steamer but may bring—may, you understand—some genius in the steerage that will quite eclipse the most brilliant luminary of the cabins and the "ship's concert."
In the main, it is not the fault of the steerage folks that they are in the steerage. Change the accident of birth, and most of the first cabin would be in the steerage, and most of the steerage would be in the first cabin. Some, to be sure, would overpower and transform any fortune, would sink from the highest or rise from the lowest; but most of men remain where they chance to be born.
Every shipload, however, is made up of two other worlds, and these also are as far apart as heaven and hell, and these are not conterminous with the first cabin and the steerage. I mean those whose souls are steerage souls and those whose souls are living in the first cabins.
If the physical contrast is great, this spiritual contrast is far greater. Some will be found whose spirits range the broadest decks of the ship of life, command the widest horizons, commune with the loveliest visions. These are the true first-cabin passengers, though their bodies are in the steerage. And others will be found whose souls are wallowing in the dirty, cooped-up pen of greed and selfishness. These are the steerage passengers, though their bodies happen to occupy the finest staterooms on board.
Now it often is not within a man's choice, whether he shall ride first cabin, second cabin, or steerage. A thousand circumstances, or combinations of circumstances, will decide this for him. But it is within every man's power to lift his soul out of the steerage and place it on the promenade deck of the ship of life.
Are you, am I, a first-cabin passenger?